


We Licked Our Long Teeth Clean and Set to Work

by somedayisours



Series: Before All Others [9]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alchemy, Ambition, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Child Prodigy, Classical Music, Destructive Behaviour, Destructive Tendencies, Gen, Mentor/Protégé, Music, Origin Story, Original Character Death(s), Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-23
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:41:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21538408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somedayisours/pseuds/somedayisours
Summary: "As a boy Zolf's father had wanted him to be a composer..." Zolf J. Kimblee before Ishval.
Series: Before All Others [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1325369
Comments: 5
Kudos: 8





	We Licked Our Long Teeth Clean and Set to Work

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _If You're Going to Look Like a Wolf They Have to Love You More Than They Fear You._ by Abigail Chabitnoy.

He was fourteen the first time he really had the chance to see alchemy performed. It'd been a rainy afternoon after practice when an older man had repaired the torn canopy of Zolf's umbrella for him. The man had made it appear simple because of his experience with alchemy, even explained the process when Zolf had asked it of him.

"The canopy on an umbrella is usually nylon taffeta with very tightly knit threads, a straightforward tear like this has me simply—" The old man's hands came up to form air quotes "—'tying' the threads back together. Now, if there had been a hole with a piece of the fabric missing it'd be a whole different story. I'd be running the risk of compromising the whole canopy trying to fill that hole by thinning the threads."

And the boy Zolf J. Kimblee had been was gone.

Pages upon pages of sheet music, years worth of practices, and the well-worn instruments were all tossed aside for borrowed alchemical books and clean sheets of plain paper. The elderly man who had introduced him to alchemy was more than willing to nurture and grow Zolf's basic alchemical interest into solid knowledge. And then that became Zolf tearing up his mother's back garden for practical practice, shredding the earth to form a variety of useless things just to get a feel for it.

It seemed to go on and on like that for him, the extent of alchemy metaphorically stretching forward for as far as his eyes could see. Every new piece of knowledge he learned was only a single drop from the well. The understanding of alchemy seemed to have no end, even after hundreds of thousands of years of practitioners striving for more.

Zolf's mentor had passed with the dwindling heat of summer and nothing more for the man to teach him. His mother accused him of not mourning the man properly, his father started with the old complaint of him wasting his time on frivolous things that'd lead nowhere.  
It was almost as if everything around him seemed to breakdown into the worth of their individual parts, into how meaningless they all were. So he burned the sheet music and the instruments he'd packed away some many years before to show his father what they meant to him. There'd been no more talk of Zolf returning to his 'proper practices' after that.

In the dead of that winter the Donato Navrátil Concert Hall, the one he'd performed in as a child, burned. It’d been an explosion, one that had left Zolf's ears ringing for a week afterward. The ground had shaken and cast the sky with the colours of its flames.

It was a well-known fact that Tchaikovsky had come to despise his own work in the 1812 Overture because of how it was loved. It had been the final piece played at Donato Navrátil as far as anyone possibly knew, an event that seemed to mark the symbolic end of an era in Kimblee's mind. 

The concert hall he'd performed in as a child was nothing more than ruin, the instruments he'd learned to play on burned in the fireplace, his mother's yard destroyed by his own clumsy hands, and just like that, he knew what he wanted from his alchemy. 


End file.
